24 Hour Bauer Power

Super Spoiler Alert: If you haven't watched any of this season's 24: Live Another Day and are planning to binge watch later on DVD, DVR, or whatever pagan device you use, best read no further to avoid any "reveals." I'm going to give away as little as I can, but viewers have gotten very prickly about perceived spoilers, even about shows that have ended their run. They discover Breaking Bad five years late and then expect everyone to tiptoe around them. Even so: If you're not "up" on 24: 2014, you've been duly warned.

Perhaps it's the circles I move in--oh who am I kidding? I have no circles and I barely move--but I've been seeing/hearing remarkably little hubbub and stridulation about the return of Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer, the Captain America of post 9/11, in Fox's 24: Live Another Day. I would have thought that given the franchise's fanatical popularity and Bauer's return from the furtive shadows after four years there would be far more fuss made. Perhaps it's the funnel nature of my Twitter timeline--overpopulated perhaps with too many trendy wanks (not that I'm casting any aspersions--but 24's comeback hasn't received anywhere near the amount of bleacher chatter that Orphan Black, Orange Is the New Black, Louie and his grubby grope, and Hannibal's season enders have, never mind such village-crushing juggernauts as Game of Thrones. Last Monday, as a minor experiment to see if anyone else in my Twitter feed was watching the 24 episode in progress, I cryptically tweeted a line of dialogue--Jack's gruff, "Wake the bitch up"--to see if anyone would bite, but no, nothing. If I had tossed out a juicy morsel from OITNB I'm sure I would have gotten ripples.

But the primary reason I'm semi-mystified by the quiet in the jungle is that 24: Live Another Day has been sensational this season, and I say that as someone who was never the devotee of Bauer's heroics that others were back when Republican pols were citing him as the sort of fearless, ruthlessly expedient hero we needed to wage the war on terrorism. There are entire seasons I've missed or seen only partially, so I didn't approach this latest rubble-maker of apocalyptic derring-do with heavy expectations or accumulated mythos, only to find myself hooked. The casting is superb, though Stephen Fry may have been too obvious a choice as Britain's panda prime Minister, with GoT alumnus Michelle Fairley as terrorist mastermind Margot Al-Harazi doing the scariest Madea you've ever seen without resorting to melodrama, her features dehydrating from the unrelenting dedication to her vengeful mission; Emily Berrington as Margot's daughter Simone, whose eyes seem dialed into a different station than the rest of the planet's; Yvonne Strahovski as the CIA operative Kate Morgan, who firsts tries to track Bauer down, then joins his side to foil the terrorist plot; and, playing the American president, William Devane, who imbues even the most sincere bit of dialogue with crafty devilry embedded in a dignity Devane didn't have as a younger actor. And then there's integral regular in the Bauer saga, Mary Lynn Rajskub's Chloe, her Siouxsie Sioux cat eyes always darting sideways as if cheating on a test as she performs prodigious feats of hacking on her laptop as Bauer keeps telling her to hurry up, what's left of civilization hanging in the balance.

The trademark action, crosscutting, reversals, crossfires, and doom-poised cliffhangers maintain a propulsive excitement and this season benefits hugely from being shot on location in London, whose tight streets, sullen brickwork, and familar landmarks (tonight there's a shootout at Waterloo Station) are a nice change from the glass towers and speedway that dominate the Tom Cruise/Jason Bourne/Die Hard genre.

The drone menace that drives this season's destruction machine turns out to be a far more provocative, morally complex delivery system than one might have expected of a show with this rightward rah-rah reputation. Yes, the terrorists who have taken over US drones are baddies who must be stopped, but the sight of the carnage, rubble, and chaos they hellfire upon London, the anguished screams and hobbling bodies with missing limbs that follow, rubs in our faces what it's like to be on the receiving end of a drone strike. The US has unleashed drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and perhaps before the year is out will do so in Iraq, and the dead and wounded have no faces or names for Americans, unless the military nails a high-profile operative. It's long-range, antiseptic, video-game screen asssassination, abstract and sanitized for most Americans, thunderbolts hurled from on high, and here is 24 showing us what it's like to be the ones in the crosshairs, giving us a visual taste of our own medicine. And for pundits and politicians who spout glibly about a drone taking out an enemy leader, last week's 24 gave us treatment in reverse in an empty stadium scene reminiscent of the midfield confrontation in Dirty Harry, only this reckoning was movingly, harrowingly one-sided.

Tonight it's payback time and I for one will be watching, unlike the rest of my commie Twitter followers.